New magic in Houdini’s hometown
Wisconsin city hosts four-day alt-country music fest
There’s more than one kind of magic happening in an out-of-theway Wisconsin city.
Appleton is the boyhood hometown of magician Harry Houdini, who started to hone his skills as an escape artist after falling through the Fox River. A plaque commemorates the spot. Appleton’s new magic is music. Located 50 kilometres southwest of Green Bay, Appleton has become a mecca for thousands of alt-country and roots music fans who double the population of this city of 70,000 for four days each August.
The Mile of Music Festival, which marks its fifth year, or Mile 5, from Aug. 3-6, was co-founded by Grammy nominated roots-folk singer Cory Chisel, who packed in a career in Nashville to return to Wisconsin.
The son of a Baptist minister, he has since also set up the non-profit Refuge, a talent incubator for aspiring musicians, in an old monastery along the same Fox River where young Houdini took his icy dip. (Also involved in the Refuge as members of a curation board are Rosanne Cash, Patrick Carney of the Black Keys and Jimmy Chamberlin of Smashing Pumpkins.)
Mile of Music takes place in 70 venues downtown, with some 800 live music sets and more than 200 performers, including multiple performances by Chisel. Among the performers this year is Hamilton, Ont., singer-songwriter Terra Lightfoot.
There’s even a local craft beer from Appleton’s Stone Arch craft brewery to mark the event — Mile of Music Americana Pale Ale.
While the festival is the biggest event in Appleton, it’s not the only attraction.
Part of a group of communities known collectively as Fox Cities, Appletown solidified commitment to the arts with the US$45-million Fox Cities Performing Arts Center, which seats 2,100 and attracts touring Broadway shows and acts as diverse as Alice Cooper and Diana Ross.
The region’s economy was built on the toilet and tissue paper industry, a heritage honoured at the innovative Paper Discovery Centre where visitors are able to try their hand at paper making.
Nearby in picturesque Neenah, the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass, which opened in 1959, has one of the world’s largest collections of paperweights. In total, there are 3,500 objects of glass art in a collection that started with Evangeline Bergstrom’s purchase of a glass paperweight on a trip to Florida in 1935.
For art buffs, the Trout Museum of Art, located in a former furniture store, has a Salvador Dali. For history buffs, Hearthstone Historic House was the first home in the world to be lit by electricity. And for baseball fans, the minor-league Timber Rattlers thrill up to 5,500 fans by challenging them to literally catch a flying brat — bratwursts delivered by a “bratzooka.”
I caught no brats but I did race two other competitors around the outfield in a go-kart shaped like a transport truck.